Biodiversity Associates v. Cables, No. 03-1002.

• Decision Date: 04 February 2004
• Docket Number: No. 03-1002.
• Citation: 357 F.3d 1152
• Parties: BIODIVERSITY ASSOCIATES and Brian Brademeyer, Plaintiffs-Appellants, Sierra Club and The Wilderness Society, Plaintiffs, v. Rick D. CABLES, in his official capacity as Regional Forester of the Rocky Mountain Region of the U.S. Forest Service; Dale N. Bosworth, in his official capacity as Chief of the U.S. Forest Service; John C. Twiss, in his official capacity as Supervisor of the Black Hills National Forest; U.S. Forest Service, Defendants-Appellees, Larry Gabriel, in his official capacity as Secretary of the South Dakota Department of Agriculture; Black Hills Regional Multiple Use Coalition; Black Hills Forest Resource Association; Meade County, Lawrence County, and Pennington County, all political subdivisions the State of South Dakota,<SMALL><SUP>*</SUP></SMALL> Defendants-Intervenors-Appellees.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Tenth Circuit

Page 1152

357 F.3d 1152

BIODIVERSITY ASSOCIATES and Brian Brademeyer, Plaintiffs-Appellants Sierra Club and The Wilderness Society, Plaintiffs, v. Rick D. CABLES, in his official capacity as Regional Forester of the Rocky Mountain Region of the U.S. Forest Service; Dale N. Bosworth, in his official capacity as Chief of the U.S. Forest Service; John C. Twiss, in his official capacity as Supervisor of the Black Hills National Forest; U.S. Forest Service, Defendants-Appellees Larry Gabriel, in his official capacity as Secretary of the South Dakota Department of Agriculture; Black Hills Regional Multiple Use Coalition; Black Hills Forest Resource Association; Meade County, Lawrence County, and Pennington County, all political subdivisions the State of South Dakota,^* Defendants-Intervenors-Appellees.

No. 03-1002.

United States Court of Appeals, Tenth Circuit.

February 4, 2004.

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Ray Vaughn of WildLaw, Montgomery, AL, (Steve Novak of WildLaw, Asheville, NC, with him on the briefs), for Plaintiffs-Appellants.

Kevin Traskos, Assistant United States Attorney (John W. Suthers, United States Attorney, with him on the brief), Denver, CO, for Defendants-Appellees.

Diane Best, Assistant Attorney General (Lawrence E. Long, Attorney General; Charles D. McGuigan, Assistant Attorney General, with her on the brief), State of South Dakota, Pierre, SD, for Defendants-Intervenors-Appellees.

Before MURPHY, Circuit Judge, BRORBY, Senior Circuit Judge, and McCONNELL, Circuit Judge.

McCONNELL, Circuit Judge.

For many years, Congress has been unable to come to agreement on nationwide legislation to address the dangers of insect infestation and fire in the national forests. In 2002, however, in a rider to a supplemental appropriations act for the war on terrorism, Congress passed legislation applicable to selected sections of the Black Hills National Forest in South Dakota and nowhere else, permitting logging and other clearance measures as a means of averting forest fires. The legislation specifies forest management techniques for these lands in minute detail, overrides otherwise applicable environmental laws and attendant administrative review procedures, and explicitly supersedes a settlement agreement between the Forest Service and various environmental groups regarding management of these lands.

The question presented is whether the extraordinary specificity of this legislation, coupled with its displacement of a settlement agreement, amounts to congressional violation of the Constitution's separation of powers, by invading the province of the executive branch, the judicial branch, or both. We hold that it does not. Article IV, § 3, cl. 2 expressly grants Congress "Power to dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the United States." With respect to this power — like most of its enumerated powers — Congress is permitted to be as specific as it deems appropriate. Moreover, settlement agreements between private litigants and the executive branch cannot divest Congress of its constitutionally vested authority to legislate.

BACKGROUND

The first law involved in this case is the law of unintended consequences. Fire suppression efforts conducted over more than a century in large parts of the West have had the unintended effect of transforming forests from savannah-like grasslands studded with well-spaced large, old, fire-resistant trees, into thicker, denser forests.¹ Prior to the arrival of Europeans, these forests experienced frequent, but relatively mild, forest fires caused primarily by lightning and Native American activity.² These fires would clear the forest floor of undergrowth and saplings while leaving the larger trees unscathed. The denser forests produced by fire suppression accumulate more combustible fuel and are more vulnerable to infestations, such as mountain pine beetles, and to fires far more intense and devastating than those of the pre-settlement era.³ Forestry experts are divided as to the response to these conditions. Some advocate a hands-off approach, allowing fire (outside areas of human habitation) to reconstitute the forests in their natural state; some advocate controlled burns; and some advocate thinning and fuel removal.⁴ The role of commercial logging as part of the last approach has been particularly controversial.

From 1983 to 1997, the Beaver Park Roadless Area, a relatively pristine portion of the Black Hills National Forest, was free of logging activity, apparently because the land management plan then in place did not allow it. In 1997, however, the Forest Service approved a new Black Hills National Forest plan revision (the "1997 Revised Plan"), which allowed logging in a significant portion of Beaver Park's 5,109 acres. It subsequently began preparations for a timber sale in an area called the "Veteran/Boulder Project Area," which included most of the Beaver Park land newly authorized for logging. Especially in a part of the area known as Forbes Gulch, a major purpose of the logging was to counter an infestation of mountain pine beetles. The Forest Service proceeded to clear various administrative hurdles in preparation for the Veteran/Boulder timber sale, issuing a final environmental impact statement on the proposed sale and records of decision approving timber harvest both inside and outside the Beaver Park Roadless Area.

Several environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, the Wilderness Society, and Appellant Biodiversity Conservation Alliance (BCA),⁵ objected strenuously to the timber sale. The Beaver Park Roadless Area was one of the last areas in the Black Hills National Forest still eligible for designation as a wilderness, and logging activity would likely disqualify it from being designated as such.⁶ The environmental groups were also concerned about the effects that the Veteran/Boulder timber sale would have on the viability of the northern goshawk population in the Forest. Accordingly, they brought administrative challenges to both the particular project and the recently revised plan under which it was approved.

The groups met with mixed success in their administrative challenges. Their challenge to the Veteran/Boulder sale was initially denied in its entirety, though the sale was stayed pending review of the Revised Plan itself. Then, on October 12, 1999, the Chief of the Forest Service upheld the 1997 Revised Plan in most respects, but found that there was inadequate support in the record for the conclusion that the Revised Plan's proposed changes would not threaten the viability of several species, including the northern goshawk. He therefore ordered further research into that question. In the meanwhile, the Forest Service did not stop all pending projects, but instead provided interim directions that would apply until the identified defects in the Revised Plan were remedied. As a result, when the stay on the sale expired, the Forest Service went forward and put the timber out for bid.

The Sierra Club, the Wilderness Society, and BCA brought suit challenging the sale in federal district court, claiming that the Forest Service could not rely on an "illegal" plan to justify project-level decisions under that plan. Specifically, they argued that the final environmental impact statement's conclusion that the Veteran/Boulder sale would not affect the viability of the northern goshawk was based on the very findings in the 1997 Revised Plan that had been disapproved.

In the waning days of the Clinton Administration, in September of 2000, the Forest Service signed a settlement agreement with the plaintiff groups, under which it agreed not to allow any tree cutting in the Beaver Park Roadless Area, at least until the Service approved a new land and resource management plan remedying the defects of the 1997 plan. The settlement was approved by the United States District Court for the District of Colorado, which had jurisdiction over the lawsuit because the relevant Forest Service offices were in Colorado.

The process of approving a new plan took much longer than anticipated. The record does not reveal whether the mountain pine beetles of western South Dakota were aware of the settlement agreement or participated in the plan revision process, but it is clear that they did not wait for authorization from Washington before undertaking an expanded program of forest resource exploitation. Just two years after the initial Veteran/Boulder environmental impact statement, the mountain pine beetle infestation in this section of the Black Hills had reached epidemic proportions. According to Forest Service estimates, the pine beetles killed 114,000 trees in 2002, as compared to only 15,000 in 1999. This convinced forest managers that immediate harvesting of deadwood and infested trees, which the settlement agreement prohibited, was necessary to guard against further spread of the infestation and potentially disastrous forest fires.

Given that approval of a corrected resource management plan was still a long way off, the Forest Service and the local South Dakota interests that shared its concerns had a choice: they could either attempt to obtain consent to the tree cutting from the original parties to the agreement, or with the help of South Dakota's congressional delegation, they could attempt to overturn the settlement agreement's prohibition by legislation. The Forest Service began by trying the consensual approach. Perhaps spurred by the threat of intervention from Congress, the signatories to the settlement met with the Forest Service to discuss changing the agreement in light of the mountain pine beetle problem. The Forest Service reached agreement with the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society, but BCA and Brian Brademeyer, then chair of the Black Hills Sierra Club, refused to agree to proposed modifications in the settlement.⁷ Stymied, South Dakota...